Turn 146
ok, i think the abi vs fake aksum discussion for HE is a little misguided, and here is why.... fake aksum would be such a strong city that it OVERSHOOTS one relevant military unit per turn, and then the extra production goes unmultiplied with an HE setup. at 34 base hpt * 2.25 = 76.5 hpt a maxed-out abi is already basically strong enough to 1-turn muskets, and with replaceable parts it can 1-turn knights as well, but fake aksum's 48 hpt is way over both thresholds, so we'd have to semi-frequently either switch to infra to use the overflow (which is notably not a military unit...) or give tiles to some other city (in which case they aren't multiplied). that will probably stay the case throughout the game too as we get more expensive units but both cities also get more production boosts from levees, factories, biology, etc. so... i think we're supposed to put the HE in abi and ironworks in evil aksum if we get it, at which point they can both 1-turn military as needed but evil aksum can also dump 150 hpt into wonders on the turns when it overshoots lol
as expected, nauf slammed through the pike garrison in massawa, and as not strictly expected but not really surprising either, they did the end run to eat hawulti's one spear as well. so the race is on! with 7 relevant defenders in gondar i think we stand a fair chance of taking it but it would be messy, we'd probably have to bomb out the defenses first and then attack the next turn for lack of cats.... i was afraid a big pile of naufragar knights would move up this turn to make that dicey but it seems they have not, so we should JUST have time to pull that off unless there are a bunch hiding somewhere i can't see. but the tightness of the timing here is such that we probably would JUST not have time to pull that off if we hadn't oopsied last turn, or if the turnsplit with nauf broke differently
HEY no stealing my chop.... rude :< i hope that doesn't mean they're sufficiently invested in this area that it would cause a diplo crisis to settle here.....of course the city is so marginal that i don't want to risk a war over it, but it's freaking 3 tiles from mitakeumi and 5 from the capital, surely it can't upset them THAT much right...? anyways yeah, decided on this as the first of our filler sites as it needs to get the castle up quickly. the other two settlers will divert to the aksum area for now in case the chance arises to save that poor crab/build a world-devouring quadruple-food ironworks city, but if nauf takes either gondar or the capital that's off the table and we will just settle them normally like normal people
ginger is going to get these two tiles back at ankyra after ten thousand years, and i've decided i'm ok with that... well, not ok with it precisely, but the kind of effort we'd need to undertake to MAYBE catch them in culture again just seems not worth it compared to building more troops and a castle. so they can have their two tiles and consequently suck valuable commerce out of our most likely oxford/wall street city.... i guess i'm willing to imagine that by the time we're ready to build those, we will have reacquired these tiles by, um, other means
tell me GT, how many pikes and crossbows does it take to dislodge two guerilla PRO longbow on a hill... according to vodka the answer is 5 to be favored to do so, with 3.3 expected casualties for GT. if they are willing to take that kind of trade, i will consider these 2 longbows to be 100 hammers well-spent. and if they are NOT willing to take it, then next turn it will be 4 longbows, and we can very quickly start adding some cats as well...
found the sharkfinniest sharkfin:
what happens when you whip 8 cities on the turn you come out of a golden age? um... that, i guess
spent a good long time worrying about which tile next to gondar we're supposed to move our stack to. if we take the city, they are equivalent in terms of ability to push northwards, as aksum apparently (see the hill N-NE of lalibela) has 4th ring borders, so it will claim the northern tile but not the southern tile, so we can use the road through gondar to reach all the same tiles we could have reached from the northern tile. the difference arises if we find that we can NOT take gondar by storm for whatever reason. then the northern tile is somewhat more forcing as it allows us to fork gondar and aksum with 2-movers.... which is relevant because i think the most likely situation in which we can't take gondar by force is one in which GT reallocates the aksum garrison there, in which case the capital would be exposed. but in exchange, the northern tile exposes us to attack via combat-worker from the pinned tile in the fog, where GT could in theory have moved the addis ababa garrison last turn to set a trap for us. there was a GT worker on the corn N of gondar last turn, and it's gone this turn, so it might be in the area still... we do see a worker on the hill W-NW of aksum right now, which is NOT in range to road the pinned fog tile this round, but while it might be the same one from last turn there's no way to know for sure... on defense, our stack has 4 impis and an injured (2.9 health) shock axe covering the cats from pike attack, and GT has... exactly 5 pikes in range (all in gondar), so if they have ANY more pikes in the fogged tiles they could break through and disastrously kill some cats....
wait hang on, i need to worldbuilder something real quick....
well shit. wtf am i doing.... on flatground, impis ARE NOT sufficient to cover the cats... well, the one shock inpi we have here is, but if GT attacks out with the garrison against this group they will take good damage on the pikes but will kill 3 or maybe even 4 of our 5 cats! shit, well why didn't they do that last turn then? is the point that attacking last turn would have exposed the injured pikes to counterattack on flat ground and let us mob the two crossbows left in the city with horse archers, while doing so THIS turn from inside the city will be safe? if so we could be walking into a death trap here....
so what happens if we wait a turn? well
you can see nauf's monster stack SE of qohaito, with which gondar cannot survive a direct engagement after cat collateral. so if we pause this turn to move up 1-movers to cover the cats, nauf advances on their turn to within 2 tiles of gondar, then we move next to gondar on our turn, then they move next to gondar, then we bombard the defenses but can't attack in without collateral, and oops we just gave the city to nauf??!! oh FUCK that >:|
we do have another option but i don't like it.... we could burn our great general to promote the shock axe in matara to morale and create one singular, very powerful anti-pike defender to add to the stack. we would need to hit the sweet spot where it is favored to take out multiple pikes if they attack in, but where a combat 1 horse archer still defends over it against an attacking crossbow. ok let me worldbuild that out as well
well, our super-axe would get odds against an attacking pike (it had better!) and is successfully NOT snipeable with a crossbow. the peak of the distribution gives 52 or 68 health remaining after such an attack.... at 68 health:
the axe does still defend against the next pike attack. it will probably die, but should do good damage to the attacker in return. then the shock impi defends over a cat as well, so the modal outcome is that they must spend 3 pikes to get through the cats, and will probably take losses in so doing.
if we spend a GG like this, he's never coming back of course, and due to the escalating GG costs that's a big delay en route to a possible commando factory, and in the short term means we couldn't pump triple-promoted mounted units out of our heroic epic city and would have to content ourselves with guerilla 2 tokugawa muskets. but perhaps i'm fine with that? i mean, what are we going to use that third promotion for, amphibious? we can get that on a musket anyways without a settled GG.... formation is a good try but again we can get that on a 5XP musket too, though admittedly that would then be a 1-mover and only really effective at killing mounted units in our territory. or mobility, probably the best idea of the three to keep up with the guerilla corps but i think still not better in most circumstances than taking an anti-(insert specific unit type) promo... not to mention it may not actually come out to a delay on the commando factory for the following reason: if we dump all the GG XP into the one axe (and i think we would, i want to absolutely maximize the odds of getting good rolls on defense and shielding multiple cats) it will be at 23/25 XP and just 2 combats away from unlocking west point, which we needed to spend a GG for anyways en route to commandos. that's if it survives, which of course it might not, but ehhhh i think in summation i have probably talked myself into this.... if they attack out and use 5 pikes to kill 2-3 cats, spending all their fortify bonus and taking significant damage in so doing, i think our odds of mobbing down what's left with horse archers on our turn should be pretty good
idk if this is how combat math actually works, but i do also think this guy should JUST take priority on defense over a cat vs a pike attacker, on the grounds that 2.9 * 1.85 is just barely greater than 5
noooope i committed another of what would be a reloadable screwup here had i not used my oopsie, nice! moving a longbow into the city means there is now no way to put all the GG XP into the axe and still get it onto the stack-covering tile in time, and we will have to settle for a combat 2/shock/morale axe (who does NOT get us closer to west point) and what will probably end up as an 18XP guerilla 3 (+ tbd) longbow. but you know, i guess that's not horrible, we can get good use out of a guerilla 3 + TBD longbow... and it is not unimaginable that we could scrounge up 7 XP to manually promote that guy for west point either.... not in THIS war mind you but eventually...
wait...
if this guy is level 4 with just 10 XP, does that mean i'm stupid as hell and the 18 XP longbow suffices to get us west point eligibility right now...?
also i am correct in assuming we won't lose eligibility if the unit dies, right?
i picked this tile because i discovered a problem with the tile 1E of gondar.... to move the stack there and protect our reinforcements from an attack out of the city, we have to pillage the road 1SE of gondar.... but that's the only road connecting the reinforcements to the city that won't still be under ethiopian control if the city falls to facilitate our advance. and maybe more importantly, we couldn't then get a longbow into the city next turn if we attack in case GT is in position to counter... so we go for the move that asserts confidence in our ability to take gondar and then roll on to the capital. if we fail in that somehow and nauf gets the city, it's still not any slower in pushing north i think as we could then use what would be nauf's road through the city
so between this tile and the one to the SE, we have 28 units in range of the city, "only" 4 of which are varying degrees of critically injured (and only all of which are obsolete, except maybe the cats
). if they attack out with crossbows they will splat against the c2 horses, and of the 5 pikes, at least 3 would have to attack non-cat defenders, one of which would probably die to takeda shingen. i do not THINK attacking out will save the city here even if they kill 2 cats, unless they roll really well and take almost no damage on their pikes in doing so.... favored to kill a cat is one thing, favored to kill a cat AND take so little damage that you won't die on the counter to 2 horse archers is another thing entirely...
not sure if we can go in next turn or if we have to bombard, it probably depends on what GT does. but really any outcome that ends in us actually getting gondar somehow would be quite the coup
sigh. so ends another exhausting morning here in farmworld
you can see that for the most part we're still pumping troops like we're at war here, but next turn Infrastructure Week will begin..... ok, no, that's a miserable lie and i know it. but what we WILL do next turn is swap every single city that already has walls to a 33-hammer PRO+stone castle, which is both a military build and an econ build. you can see mitakeumi is banging out its inexplicably-delayed walls as well in anticipation of joining them (not to mention for mita specifically, home of our spy specialist, the castle is worth 1.5 EP as well lol). other cities will build some combination of troops and settlers in the meantime, then swap to 50-hammer walls + castles once the other cities can pick up the slack militarily. then juuuust maybe i will think about adding a few more courthouses.
not sure when we're supposed to run run run up to the heroic epic tech-wise btw.... even with the missing aesthetics + polytheism prereqs it's still a fraction of the cost of guilds, but not THAT small a fraction (a little over half the cost, maybe less after KTBs). ostensibly abi wants a little more time before starting it so we can go castle -> forge -> courthouse first but we don't actually HAVE to do that, we can live with paying for one city that just never gets its courthouse.... but then again, in how many cities do we expect to prefer 90-hammer knights over 2 50-hammer longbows? i think the answer is "not that many"... i am nowhere close to satisfied with our border garrisons as of now, we really want like 7-8 in every exposed city if we can swing it i think.
